The invention relates to a guide shaft for a chip card holding assembly having a card holder on which a support which is assigned to the chip cards and lateral guides are formed, and having means for holding down in a sprung fashion a chip card on the support.
When chip cards are used in vehicles there is, depending on the environment, an increased risk of contact breaks due to soiling or chip cards moving due to unavoidable jolts. In addition, for example when chip cards are used in tacographs, the chip cards are introduced and removed relatively frequently owing to changes of driver and vehicle as well as traffic controls and the chip cards, which are used for driver-related storage of at least the personal working times and rest times, are not always handled with the necessary care, and as a result of this, but also due to the chip cards being carried and stored outside a vehicle, they may be damaged or deformed. However, such deformations of chip cards do not always lead to a situation in which, when a chip card is introduced into the holding assembly, the write/read contacts are damaged or the function of the chip card is disrupted when it is in the write/read position.
International patent application WO 00/30016, French laid-open patent application FR 2 687 238 and European patent application EP 0 742 529 A2 each disclose guide shafts for chip card holding devices of the abovementioned type which use elastic means for holding down the chip card which has been introduced. So that even greatly deformed chip cards experience the necessary correction of their shape in order to read out the entered card with elastic deformation, in these arrangements a high degree of spring force is always to be provided which has to be correspondingly overcome within the scope of each chip card-introducing operation. This results, on the one hand, in the need to use extremely strong spring elements, and on the other hand in a high degree of wear of the chip card in the regions in which the holding-down elastic elements slide over the surfaces. Given a weaker spring force of the holding down elements, reliable formation of contact is put at risk when the chip card is not correctly orientated.